The Porn Trial That’s Captivating China’s Internet

A screen shot shows a portion of the live blog feed of the Qvod trial on the Sina web portal on Friday. The characters at top repeat Qvod CEO’s final statement to the court: “Qvod is innocent. I’m innocent.”

Sina Corp.

The porn industry is known for driving innovation online. After the live-streamed trial on pornography charges of four Chinese Internet executives went viral over the weekend, it’s now driving an unusually vigorous debate in China over how the Internet should be managed.

At the center of the debate is Wang Xin, the CEO of Shenzhen Qvod Technology Co. Ltd., which is best known for running the widely used online video player called Kuaibo. Mr. Wang spirited self-defense in the face of allegations he helped disseminate thousands of sex videos has turned him into something of a Chinese Larry Flynt.

Similar to the Hustler publisher, who famously used his pornographic publishing empire to test the legal bounds of free speech in the U.S., Mr. Wang used the popularity of his company’s video platform to try to turn the tables on China’s Internet censorship regime.

Prosecutors alleged in the two-day trial in Beijing late last week that Qvod executives knew their video platform, Kuaibo, was a popular tool for watching porn and did nothing to stop it. They said porn videos, which are illegal in China, made up 70% of the 30,000 files police had pulled from servers connected to Kuaibo. Mr. Wang’s argument, delivered in a spirited and well-prepared defense that drew applause online: The company was responsible for producing the platform, not policing what people did with it.

Efforts by governments to hold the creators of online platforms responsible for the content their users post are hardly new. In early days of the Internet, U.S. companies like Google, Yahoo and America Online faced a slew of lawsuits — and a piece of legislation known as the Communications Decency Act — that attempted to hold them legally liable for hosting vulgar, misleading or illegal content. Generally, those efforts ended in failure.

In China, the outsourcing of censorship to the websites themselves is a central part of authorities’ strategy in trying to keep tight control over 650 million Internet users and the hundreds of news, video and social media sites they visit. Some technology companies consider the requirement a costly measure that stifles innovation.

Beijing has also increasingly tried to use criminal courts to regulate behavior online and quash rumors and criticisms of the government while also cracking down on porn and other illicit content.

Profiting from the dissemination for pornography — the charge Mr. Wang and three other Qvod executives face — carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, but it’s unlikely they’ll face such a stiff penalty, according to Zhang Zhiyong, a member of the Qvod legal team. Local courts like the Haidian District Court are not authorized to issue life sentences, Mr. Zhang said, adding that it wasn’t clear when or how the court might issue a final ruling.

Prosecutors and the Haidian court did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Wang and the other executives on trial either couldn’t be reached or declined to comment.

The Qvod trial was broadcast live as well as live-blogged on the Sina web portal, attracting millions of views and generating tens of thousands of comments. Internet users remarked at how the Qvod executives and their legal team seemed to run circles around prosecutors and the judges, who sometimes struggled with technical aspects of the case.

At one point prosecutors cited a web search for “Kuaibo” and “porn,” which they said produced more results than similar searches with two other platforms. Mr. Wang dismissed the argument as “meaningless,” pointing out that searches with still-other platforms would likely produce even more results. When prosecutors asked why the company’s leader didn’t change their business model after it became clear users were watching porn on the platform, a Qvod lawyer shot back.

“Every day on my mobile phone I get text messages trying to defraud me. Why don’t you ask China Mobile to change its business model?” said Zhao Zhijun, one of Mr. Wang’s lawyers, referring to China’s dominant state-run mobile carrier.

Qvod’s lawyers also questioned police statistics on the ratio of porn videos to non-porn content found on the servers, suggesting police may have cherry-picked which files they examined. A police officer responsible for examining the files stood by the numbers, saying he screened between 600 and 800 video files a day during the investigation.

Kuaibo had been downloaded more than 300 million times before police raided Qvod’s offices in 2014, according to state media reports.

Qiao Mu, a media expert at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the issue should have been handled by Internet regulators, not by a court. “It’s become a joke. People are making fun of the court,” he said. “Everyone’s using this case as a way to express how frustrated they are with the government’s control of the Internet.”

The wave of popular support for Mr. Wang and the other Qvod executives produced rare dueling commentaries from two of the country’s most authoritative state-run news organizations. On Saturday, the Communist Party flagship newspaper People’s Daily published an essay arguing that it was inappropriate to applaud Qvod’s defense even it was admirable: “Perhaps the prosecutors didn’t acquit themselves well enough, but you can’t confuse black and white because of a good argument and you can’t give up the ‘moral’ high ground because of a lot of retweets.”

A few hours later, the official Xinhua news agency issued its own commentary arguing that the Qvod team deserved the applause. “Respecting the process, respecting the defense regardless of guilt or innocence — that’s what rule of law is,” it read.

Although Xinhua didn’t directly criticize People’s Daily, it was clear the news agency was calling the newspaper’s argument into question, said Mr. Qiao. “Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t applaud? It’s tyrannical.”

Even the country’s main Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, weighed in on the case, saying in a statement that it supported the investigation into Qvod. “The hearing should not be affected or interfered with by anyone,” the statement said.

Some lawyers questioned whether China’s prosecutors would oppose future live broadcasts of trials following the Qvod porn experience. “Otherwise, prosecutors getting publicly crushed like this will become a common scene,” one lawyer, Zhou Ze, wrote on his verified account on the Weibo social media site.

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